News

Report Release: "Post-Industrial Journalism"

November 26, 2012

According to a new report from Columbia Journalism School, journalism’s future is now.

“Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” co-authored by Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism professor and director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism;Clay Shirky, NYU professor; and C.W. Anderson, assistant professor, College of Staten Island (CUNY), provides recommendations for how news organizations can survive and thrive in the digital landscape.

“It became clear to us very early in our research that there's no such thing as the news industry anymore,” said Bell. “Journalism has fragmented so quickly in terms of practice, skills, process, revenue and even output, that newsrooms are very different places from the factories of information they were only a few years ago. It feels like the right time to have a broad discussion, not about business models…but about what skills, structures and systems give us the best chance of creating good journalism. We want this report to be a provocation in that conversation.”

The full report, “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” can be viewed online here.

“There is a real hunger for comprehensive, trustworthy, thoughtful research and analysis that makes sense of the dizzying pace of change in our profession,” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School. “Post-Industrial Journalism is an important contribution because it dares to imagine a substantially different, though robust, future for our profession, and so pushes out of the frame of focusing on how much of the traditional system we can preserve in the digital age.”

The report will be discussed at a panel discussion moderated by Dean Lemann at 7:00 p.m. on November 28, in WNYC’s Greene Space studio, with introductory remarks by Vartan Gregorian. The authors will then travel to San Francisco for a discussion moderated by Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital on Dec. 3, and an event on Dec. 5, hosted by Michael Lynton, Chairman & CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Seats are still available for both West Coast events. To RSVP for the San Francisco panel, please click here. To RSVP for the Los Angeles event, please click here.

Join the conversation about “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” by tweeting @ColumbiaJourn and @TowCenter and using the hashtag #PIJournalism.